To have and to have not

By Michael Lind, in Harper's Magazine, June, 1995

Judging by the headlines that have been leading the news for the last several
years, public debate in the United States at the end of the twentieth century
has become a war of words among the disaffected minorities that so often appear
on the never-ending talk show jointly hosted by Oprah, Larry King, Jenny Jones,
and the McLaughlin Group. Conservatives at war with liberals; Christian
fundamentalists at odds with liberal Jews; blacks at war with whites; whites at
war with Hispanic immigrants; men at war with women; heterosexuals at war with
homosexuals; and the young at war with the old. A guide to the multiple
conflicts in progress would resemble the Personals pages in The Village Voice,
with "versus" or "contra" substituted for "seeking" (Pro-Sex Classicists versus
Anti-Sex Modernists).

The noise is deceptive. Off-camera, beyond the blazing lights, past the ropy
tangle of black cords and down the hall, in the corner offices (on Capitol Hill
as well as at General Electric, The Walt Disney Company, and CBS News), people
in expensive suits quietly continue to go about the work of shifting the center
of gravity of wealth and power in the United States from the discounted many to
the privileged few. While public attention has been diverted to controversies
as inflammatory as they are trivial. Should the Constitution be amended to ban
flag-burning? Should dirty pictures be allowed on the Internet? The American
elites that subsidize and staff both the Republican and Democratic parties have
steadfastly waged a generation-long class war against the middle and working
classes. Now and then the television cameras catch a glimpse of what is going
on, as they did last year during the NAFTA and GATT debates, when a Democratic
President and a bipartisan majority in Congress collaborated in the sacrifice
of American labor to the interests of American corporations and foreign
capital. More recently, with a candor rare among politicians, House Speaker
Newt Gingrich argued against raising the minimum wage in the United States---on
the grounds that a higher minimum wage would handicap American workers in their
competition with workers in Mexico.

The camera, however, quickly returns to the set and the shouting audience,
while assistant producers hold up placards with the theme for the day: the
Contract with America, the New Covenant, Affirmative Action, Moral Renewal.
It's against the rules to talk about a rapacious American oligarchy, and the
suggestion that the small group of people with most of the money and power in
the United States just might be responsible to some degree for what has been
happening to the country over the last twenty years invariably invites the news
media to expressions of wrath and denial. Whenever a politician proposes to
speak for the many---whether he is on the left (Jerry Brown), right (Patrick
Buchanan), or center (Ross Perot)---the Op-Ed pages in the nation's better
newspapers (the Washington Post, the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal)
issue stern warnings of "demagogy." Yes, the pundits admit, economic and social
inequality have been growing in the United States, with alarming results, but
the ruling and possessing class cannot be blamed, because, well, there is no
ruling and possessing class.

The American oligarchy spares no pains in promoting the belief that it does not
exist, but the success of its disappearing act depends on equally strenuous
efforts on the part of an American public anxious to believe in egalitarian
fictions and unwilling to see what is hidden in plain sight. Anybody choosing
to see the oligarchy in its native habitat need do nothing else but walk down
the street of any big city to an office tower housing a major bank, a corporate
head-quarters or law firm, or a national television station. Enter the building
and the multiracial diversity of the street vanishes as abruptly as the sound
of the traffic. Step off the elevator at the top of the tower and apart from
the clerical and maintenance staff hardly anybody is nonwhite. The contrast
between the street and the tower is the contrast between the grass roots and
the national headquarters, the field office and the home office. No matter what
your starting point, the closer you come to the centers of American politics
and society, the more everyone begins to look the same. Though corporate
executives, shop stewards, and graduate-student lecturers could not be more
different, the people who run big business bear a remarkable resemblance to the
people who run big labor, who in turn might be mistaken for the people in
charge of the media and the universities. They are the same people. They differ
in their opinions---and in almost no other way. Almost exclusively white,
disproportionately mainline Protestant or Jewish, most of the members of the
American elites went to one of a dozen Ivy League colleges or top state
universities. Not only do they have advanced professional or graduate
degrees---J.D.'s, M.B.A.'s, Ph.D.'s, M.D.'s---but usually at least one of their
parents (and sometimes both) has advanced professional or graduate degrees.
They dress the same. They talk the same. They walk the same. They have the same
body language, the same gestures. They eat the same food, drink the same
drinks, and play the same sports. They read the same publications. They . . .
but I should say we. As a second-generation professional with an Ivy League
diploma, having worked for liberal Democrats and conservative Republicans,
business lobbyists and pro-labor intellectuals, among professors and
journalists and lawyers and Foreign Service officers, I am a card-carrying
member of the overclass. So, in all likelihood, reader, are you.

Amounting, with their dependents, to about 20 percent of the population, (1) this
relatively new and still evolving political and social oligarchy is not
identified with any particular region of the country. Homogeneous and nomadic,
the overclass is the first truly national upper class in American history. In a
managerial capitalist society like our own, the essential distinction is not
between the "bourgeoisie" (the factory owners) and the "proletariat" (the
factory workers) but between the credentialed minority (making a living from
fees or wages supplemented by stock options) and the salaried majority. The
salaried class---at-will employees, lacking a four-year college education, paid
by the hour, who can be fired at any time---constitutes the real "middle
class," accounting, as it does, for three-quarters of the population.

The white overclass, then, properly perceived, is neither a middle class nor a
high bourgeoisie but a sort of guild oligarchy, like those that ran early
modern Italian and Dutch city-states. Our latter-day oligarchs (lawyers,
bankers, publishers, anchorpersons) are the contemporary equivalents of the
plump and goateed syndics, haloed by starched collars, who gaze smugly back at
us through honey veils of impasto from the paintings of Rembrandt and Hals. The
precedent for our class war can't be found in the slapstick melee pitting
thick-necked proles against top-hatted, umbrella-wielding bourgeois that
enlivens Sergei Eisenstein's Ten Days That Shook the World. We should think,
instead, of the civic discord between great guilds and lesser guilds---the
bankers and merchants versus the artisans---that troubled cities like Florence
and Milan in the Renaissance, and that resembled the struggle over universal
health care between the insurance lobby and the AFL-CIO.

At least the syndics of Amsterdam and the Venetian families in the Golden Book
did not add insult to injury by insisting that they were not "elites." The most
remarkable thing about our own American oligarchy is the pretense that it
doesn't constitute anything as definite as a social class. We prefer to assign
good fortune to our individual merit, saying that we owe our perches in the
upper percentiles of income and education not to our connections but solely to
our own l.Q., virtue, brio, genius, sprezzatura, chutzpah, gumption. Had we
been switched at birth by accident, had we grown up in a ghetto or barrio or
trailer park, we would have arrived at our offices at ABC News or the
Republican National Committee or the ACLU in more or less the same amount of
time. The absence of black and Hispanic Americans in our schools and our
offices and our clubs can only be explained, we tell ourselves, not by our
extrinsic advantages but by their intrinsic defects. Compared with us (and
perhaps with middle-class East Asian immigrants), most blacks and Hispanics
must be disproportionately lazy, even (if Charles Murray and the late Richard
Herrnstein are to be believed) disproportionately retarded. What other
explanation for their failure to rise can there be---America, after all, is a
classless society.

Or rather a two-class society. The belated acknowledgment of an "underclass" as
a distinct group represents the only exception to the polite fiction that
everyone in the United States, from a garage mechanic to a rich attorney
(particularly the rich attorney), belongs to the "middle class." Over the past
decade the ghetto poor have been the topic of conversation at more candlelight
and-wine dinner parties than I can recall, but without looking at the program
or the wine list it is impossible to tell whether one is among nominal liberals
or nominal conservatives. The same kind of people in the same kind of suits go
on about "the blacks" as though a minority within an 12 percent minority were
taking over the country, as if Washington were Pretoria and New York a suburb
of Johannesburg. Not only do the comfortable members of the overclass single
out the weakest and least influential of their fellow citizens as the cause of
all their sorrows but they routinely, and preposterously, treat the genuine
pathologies of the ghetto---high levels of violence and illegitimacy---as the
major problems facing a country with uncontrollable trade and fiscal deficits,
a low savings rate, an obsolete military strategy, an anachronistic and corrupt
electoral system, the worst system of primary education in the First World, and
the bulk of its population facing long-term economic decline.

To be sure, upper classes in other societies have often fretted, sometimes to
the point of panic, about the lower orders, and in Japan, as in Britain and
France (to an even greater degree than in the United States), the people in
charge tend to go to the same schools, not a dozen but one or two. But in those
countries people at least acknowledge the existence of an upper stratum, and
the public-school old-boy network or the inarquate retains some tradition of
responsibility for the less fortunate, some sense of noblesse oblige based on
self preservation if not on superior morality. (As Disraeli observed in 1848,
"The palace is not safe when the cottage is not happy.") Among all the
industrial democracies, only in the United States do the members of the
oligarchy absolve themselves with the comforting notion that their class does
not exist. Willing to pursue collective economic interests but lacking any
sense of a political commonwealth, the American overclass at the end of the
twentieth century takes as its own what Adam Smith identified as "the vile
maxim of the masters of mankind.... All for ourselves, and nothing for other
people." The sentiment is heartfelt and bipartisan.

Owing in large part to the bipartisan preference for regressive over
progressive taxation, and despite the cries of anguish from Senator Phil Gramm
and the editorial writers employed by the Wall Street Journal, the United
States now stands second to last among the major industrialized countries in
the rate of taxation on income---and dead last in terms of economic equality.
The replacement of progressive income taxation by a flat tax, along with the
adoption of national sales taxes (reforms favored by many conservative
Democrats as well as Republicans), would further shift the national tax burden
from the credentialed minority to the wage earning majority. Average Americans
have not only been taxed instead of the rich; they have been taxed to repay the
rich. Borrowing, which accounted for only 5.3 percent of federal spending in
the 1960s, increased to 29.9 percent in the 1990s. Interest payments on the
debt (which last year amounted to $203 billion) represent a transfer of wealth
from ordinary American taxpayers to rich Americans and foreigners without
precedent in history.

On the second front of the class war, corporate elites continue to use the
imperatives of global free trade as a means of driving down American wages and
nullifying the social contract implicit in both the New Deal and the Great
Society. U.S. corporations now lead the world in the race to low-wage countries
with cheap and politically repressed labor forces. Concentrated in
"export-processing zones" in Third World countries, and usually not integrated
into the local economy, much of the transnational investment brings together
foreign capital and technology with inexpensive and docile labor to manufacture
consumer electronics, shoes, luggage, or toys. The export-processing zone is
nothing new; it used to be called the plantation. In the nineteenth and early
twentieth centuries, plantations owned by American, British, and European
investors produced raw materials and agriculture for export; modern technology
now permits factory work to be done in the same countries. The banana republic
is being replaced by the sweatshop republic as national, middle-class
capitalism gives way to global plantation capitalism.

Even skilled production often can be done more cheaply elsewhere. Software
research and design is now being done by local computer specialists in India,
in Russia, and in Poland. Since 1919, the real wages of high school dropouts
have declined by 20 percent, while the incomes of workers with more than four
years of college have risen by 8 percent. There are two ways to interpret the
better performance of professionals relative to other workers in the new,
internationalized economy. The most common explanation (the one preferred by
the overclass and its publicists in the major news media) is that the world
economy, in some vague way, rewards expertise and high-tech skills---though if
this were so, one would expect multilingual physicists to be growing
spectacularly rich rather than bond traders, corporate vice presidents, and
partners in large law firms, whose skills have little or nothing to do with
high technology. A more plausible explanation is that professionals in the
United States benefit from a vigorously enforced form of protectionism based on
credentials and licensing. A corporation can hire an Indian computer programmer
to do the work of an American computer programmer for a fraction of the wage,
but it cannot hire an Indian lawyer to try a case in the United States. Permit
legal briefs to be written in India and submitted to American courts by fax
from Indian lawyers, and legal fees in the United States would quickly plummet,
the skill, education, and productivity of American lawyers notwithstanding.

Not all nonprofessional jobs can be expatriated to Mexico or Malaysia, and a
great many low-skilled services---from truck driving to nursing and sales and
restaurant work---still must be performed in America. Accordingly, on a third
front of the class war, the American gentry support a generous immigration
policy. Enlarging the low-skill labor pool in the United States has the same
effect as enlarging the labor pool through the expatriation of American-owned
industry. From the point of view of members of the white overclass, of course,
this is good news---if mass immigration ended tomorrow, they would probably
have to pay higher wages, fees, and tips. In the 1980s, during the
"Massachusetts Miracle," the state's unemployment rate fell to half the
national average, 2.2 percent. As a result of a tight labor market, wages for
workers at McDonald's rose to more than $7 an hour. So unfortunate a
development prompted a study from the Twentieth Century Fund in which author
Thomas Muller took note of the awful consequences: "In many areas of the
Northeast, a scarcity of clerks in the late 1980s caused a noticeable
deterioration in service.... This is not an argument that long lines or flip
behavior by salespeople will fundamentally affect America's well-being, but
they do constitute an irritant that can diminish the quality of our life
[emphasis added]." In a seller's market for labor, it seems, there is a danger
that the help will get uppity.

"As the number of working mothers increases," Muller wrote, "such [household]
help, once considered a luxury, is becoming more and more a necessity. Were it
not for recent immigrants, nannies, maids, and gardeners would be a vanishing
breed ..." Although the vast majority of Americans still do not consider the
employment of "nannies, maids, or gardeners" to be a necessity rather than a
luxury, the 1 percent of the population that employs live-in servants (c.f.,
the recent difficulties of Zoe Baird, Kimba Wood, and Arianna Huffington)
cannot enjoy an appropriate degree of comfort without a supporting cast of
deferential helots. Our own overclass Americans are as dependent on Latina
maids as were the members of the nineteenth-century Northeastern establishment
on Irish "Bridgets" and the antebellum Southern planters on house slaves. (In
this connection, J. P. Morgan's definition of the leisure class, which he saw
as the bulwark of civilization, is instructive: "All those who can afford to
hire a maid.")

The Wall Street Journal, ever mindful of the short-run interests of the
overclass, has called for an amendment to the U.S. Constitution consisting of
five words: "There shall be open borders." If the United States and Mexican
labor markets were merged (together with the capital markets already integrated
by NAFTA), then American investment would flow south to take advantage of cheap
labor, and tens of millions of Mexican workers would migrate north to better
paying jobs, until wages stabilized somewhere above the contemporary Mexican
level (between $4 and $5 a day) but below the current American minimum wage of
$4.25 an hour. The numbers of the white overclass would remain fixed, while the
pool of cheap labor expanded, and Muller's dream of heaven would come true:
every American who is not a maid or gardener might be able to afford one.

Although the inequalities of income in the United States are now greater than
at any time since the 1930s, and although numerous observers have remarked on
the fact and cited abundant statistics in support of their observations, the
response of the American overclass has been to blame everybody but its
nonexistent self---to blame the ghetto, or the schools, or the liberal news
media, or the loss of family values. In a characteristic argument that appeared
in early April on the Op-Ed page of the Washington Post ("Raising the Minimum
Wage Isn't the Answer"), James K. Classman dismissed the idea that public
policy can help the majority of workers whose real wages continue to fall:
"[T]he ultimate answer lies with workers themselves . . . . Government can help a
bit through tax breaks for education, but ultimately the cure for low working
wages may be nothing more mysterious than high personal diligence."

In any other democracy, an enraged citizenry probably would have rebelled by
now against a national elite that weakens unions, slashes wages and benefits,
pits workers against low-wage foreign and immigrant competition---and then
informs its victims that the chief source of their economic problems is a lack
of "high personal diligence." But for whom could an enraged citizen vote? The
American overclass manages to protect itself from popular insurgencies, not
only through its ownership of the news media but also by its financial control
of elections and its use of affirmative-action patronage.

Of the three defenses, the uniquely corrupt American system of funding
elections is by far the most important, which is no doubt why campaign finance
reform was left out of the Contract with America. The real two-party system in
the United States consists not of the Democrats and the Republicans but of the
party of voters and the party of donors. The donor party is extraordinarily
small. Roughly 10 percent of the American people make political contributions,
most of them in minimal amounts. The number of large political donors is even
smaller. Citizen Action, an independent consumer group, found that in the
1989-90 election cycle only 179,677 individual donors gave contributions equal
to or greater than $200 to a federal candidate: "Thirty four percent of the
money spent by federal candidates was directly contributed by no more than one
tenth of one percent of the voting age population." One may reasonably doubt
that this one tenth of one percent is representative of the electorate or the
population at large.

We were taught in civics classes that the United States is a "pluralistic"
democracy in which Madisonian "factions" balance one another, ensuring that no
single minority or economic interest will prevail. We were lied to. Labor does
not balance big business; consumer groups do not balance big business; nobody
balances big business anymore. Contrary to conservative claims that liberal and
left-wing "special interests" dominate Congress, PAC funds come,
overwhelmingly, from business. Citizens vote occasionally; dollars vote
continually. During the first two months of this year, "soft money"
contributions, chiefly from industry, flowed into the coffers of the Republican
National Committee at the rate of $123,121 per day, and during the recently
ended two-year congressional campaign cycle, then Majority Leader Richard A.
Gephardt (D., Mo.) accumulated PAC money in the amount of $1,001,400, while
Speaker Newt Gingrich (R., Ga.) received $763,220. As recently as last April,
President Clinton appeared at a $50,000-a-couple fund raiser at Steven
Spielberg's home in Hollywood. Because the same economic oligarchy subsidizes
almost all of our politicians, our political fights are as inconsequential as
TV wrestling.

Armed with the political advantage secured by the purchase of congressmen,
senators, and presidents, the overclass shores up its defense against genuinely
representative democracy (i.e., a popular coalition uniting middle-class and
working-class Americans of all races and regions) by adopting a strategy of
divide and rule expressed in the language of multiculturalism. The dynamics of
a divided society similar to our own were noted in 1947 by Gunnar Myrdal: "In a
society where there are broad social classes and, in addition, more minute
distinctions and splits in the lower strata, the lower class groups will to a
great extent take care of keeping each other subdued, thus relieving to that
extent the higher classes of this otherwise painful task necessary to the
monopolization of its power and advantages." Centuries before today's
multiculturalists adopted the slogan "Celebrate diversity," William Smith, a
slave trader, explained his reasons for celebrating diversity among the
exploited:

As for the languages of Gambia, they are so many and so different,
that the Natives, on either side of the River, cannot understand each
other, which, if rightly consider'd, is no small Happiness to the
Europeans who go thither to trade for slaves. . . . [T]he safest Way is
to trade with the different Nations, on either side of the River, and
having some of every Sort on board, there will be no more Likelihood
of their succeeding in a Plot than of finishing the Tower of Babel.

Unified along the lines of economic interest, the wealthy American minority
hold the fragmented majority at bay by pitting blacks against whites in
zero-sum struggles for government patronage and by bribing potential black and
Hispanic leaders, who might otherwise propose something other than rhetorical
rebellion, with the gifts of affirmative action. The policy was promoted by
Richard Nixon, who, as much as any American politician, deserves to be
acknowledged as the father of racial preferences.

"What most militants want," Nixon explained in 1968, using the language of
gangsterism to support his proposal for minority contracting preferences, "is
not separation, but to be included in . . . to have a share of the wealth, and a
piece of the action." Racial-preference policies give middle-class and wealthy
blacks and Hispanics "a share of the wealth and a piece of the action." The
ritual that symbolizes civil-rights "progress" in today's oligarchic America is
the "integration" of an all-white country club, which invariably means
admitting one of the wealthiest black citizens who can be found in the local
community. Similarly, in the matter of presidential Cabinet posts, diversity
means appointing rich professionals educated in the Ivy League who happen to
belong to different races and sexes.

As the number of black and Hispanic students at selective universities and
partners in prestigious law firms is artificially maintained, the average wages
of black and Hispanic workers, along with those of white workers, continue to
stagnate or decline. The tokenism embodied in racial preference and
multiculturalism is thus about as threatening to the American elite as an
avant-garde sculpture in the lobby of a bank.

Meanwhile, behind the Potemkin Village facade of contemporary America, with its
five separate-but-equal official races and its racially authentic folk art, the
American oligarchy goes busily about the work of constructing its own enclave
society, an America-within-America, linked to the international economy and
detached from the destiny of the native middle class. What Lewis Lapham has
called "the new feudalism" reverses the trend of the past thousand years toward
the government's provision of basic public goods like policing, public roads
and transport networks, and public schools. In the United States---to a degree
unmatched in any other industrial democracy---these public goods are once again
becoming private luxuries, accessible only to the affluent few. Federal
spending declined in the 1980s for services like law enforcement and government
(by 42 percent), for education and training (by 40 percent), and for the
transportation infrastructure (by 32 percent); and most of the growth in
government spending in recent decades has taken the form of non-means-tested
entitlements, like Social Security and Medicare, that benefit middle- and
upper-income Americans.

If the notion of a neo-feudal United States seems far-fetched, consider the
"feudal" elements of modern America. Increasing numbers of affluent white
Americans have been withdrawing into gated suburbs, many of them
indistinguishable from private cities, whose community associations provide not
only security but trash collection, street cleaning, and utilities. The
inhabitants have sought permission from local governments to block off public
streets with gates and other barriers to traffic (a California appeals court
recently ruled that seven metal gates installed by the Los Angeles suburb of
Whitley Heights represented an illegal "return to feudal times"---but only
after their installation had been approved by the Los Angeles City Council).
Some of the richer residents within the walls seek not only permission to
barricade themselves but exemption from taxes---on the argument that taxes for
public municipal services on top of the fees they pay their private community
associations constitute "double taxation."

Because the affluent would rather hire mercenary forces than pay for police,
the number of private security guards in the United States now exceeds the
number of publicly employed policemen. To help those who cannot afford to rent
police officers, the right is trying to make it easier to carry concealed
weapons at the mall, in the office, and on the subway; holsters and body armor
may once again become fashion accessories. A chorus of conservative voices
proposes the replacement of public schools with taxpayer subsidized vouchers to
private schools, and the idea of replacing the national highway system with
private toll roads is not a fantasy confined to dystopian science fiction. More
than ten states now have projects for such roads, which would allow the happy
few to drive their expensive cars on state-of-the-art computer-enhanced
highways while ordinary Americans fume in traffic on crumbling public streets.

The new American urban architecture reflects the same evolution of American
society from republicanism to feudalism. Downtown office complexes begin to
resemble medieval castles-collections of towers connected by skyways and sealed
off from the growing horde of the unemployable poor. The celebrated architect
Frank Gehry specializes in what cultural critic Mike Davis calls "carceral"
architecture---for example, "stealth houses" for the wealthy, hiding their
opulent interiors from thieves behind plain gray walls. Gehry's 1984 Goldwyn
Branch Library in Hollywood (inspired by the same architect's fortified U.S.
Chancellery in Damascus, a building bristling with ten-foot steel stakes and
stylized sentry boxes) prompted Davis to describe it as "probably the most
menacing library ever built, a bizarre hybrid of a drydocked dreadnought and a
cavalry fort."

The dream of withdrawal probably explains the enthusiasm in overclass circles
for the "virtual corporation," a dematerialized entity consisting solely of a
small management team temporarily contracting out work, here to Mexicans and
South Koreans, there to Hungarians and Czechs, in the manner of the nabobs who
lived it up in eighteenth century London on their rents from Caribbean
plantations run on their behalf by thuggish overseers. This is the vision
expressed by the television commercials for IBM and the American Express Card
and the magazine advertisements for new computers and fax machines that show a
middle-aged executive communicating with his office from a beach resort or a
corporate lawyer tucking in her child via a videophone in a busy airport.
Virtual capitalism thus meets the virtual family in the utopia of the American
overclass: Dad will bask in the Caribbean sun sketching out marketing designs
on his laptop computer while Mom keeps an eye on Baby, via satellite, as she
flies from New York to Frankfurt to Tokyo. Off-camera, never seen, is the
Latina maid who actually changes Baby's diapers, and, in this or that Third
World shantytown of tin roofs and open sewers, the employees, or rather the
independent contractors, of Dad's or Mom's virtual corporation, workers as
likely as not without benefits, without insurance, without civil rights,
without a voice in their governments, laboring to make products they can never
afford to buy.

Some American executives have begun to follow the factories to Fortunate Isles.
The Wall Street Journal and Fortune recently portrayed, with considerable
sympathy, a number of rich American expatriates, among them the heirs to the
Dart container and Campbell's soup fortunes, who have renounced their U.S.
citizenship and begun new lives in more humane societies, like the Turks and
Caicos Islands and Belize. Senator Phil Gramm last spring denounced a proposal
to tax these expatriates as a measure reminiscent of "Nazi Germany," apparently
secure in the belief that the old American republican ideal of civic obligation
is nothing but totalitarianism in disguise. No doubt, when the overclass
revolution is completed, persecuted tycoons will no longer be driven out of
their hostile homeland. In America libre, it will no longer be necessary to
move to Jamaica to be able to afford maids and chauffeurs on a lawyer's salary,
or to relocate production to Honduras in order to pay the working classes no
more than a few cents an hour (House Majority Leader Dick Armey favors
abolishing the minimum wage). North America shall come to resemble Columbus's
mistaken perception of it as simply one more Caribbean island populated by
dusky masses born to be servants. The United States, which the
eighteenth-century American elite sought to refashion as a new Roman Republic,
and which the nineteenth-century American patriciate conceived of as a new and
greater Britain, shall be renovated by the new white overclass as a New
Honduras or a New Belize.

Until that blessed day, the bipartisan white overclass, secure behind urban
fronts and suburban walls, as well as the metaphorical moats of legacy
preference, expensive schooling, and an impregnable interest rate, has neither
reason nor incentive to moderate its ruthless pursuit of its own short-term
concerns. In a more homogeneous society, the growing concentration of power and
wealth in the hands of a privileged minority might be expected to produce a
strong reaction on the part of the majority. In present-day America, however,
no such reaction is likely to take place. Although heavily outnumbered, the
unified few rest secure in the knowledge that any insurgency will almost
certainly dissipate in quarrels among the fragmented many rather than in open
rebellion; during the 1992 Los Angeles riots, black, Hispanic, and white
rioters turned on Korean middlemen rather than march on Beverly Hills. The
belligerent guests on the never-ending talk show, urged on by the screaming
audience, will continue to enact allegorical conflicts, while, off-camera and
upstairs, the discreet members of the class that does not exist ponder the
choice of marble or mahogany for the walls of the executive suite from which
they command.